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An urban legend or urban myth is any modern, fictional story told as truth, similar to a modern folklore consisting of stories thought to be factual by those retelling them that reach a vast number of people, spread from person to person.

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Urban legends are most often false. Occasionally some turn out to be essentially true — inspired by an actual event — but evolved into something different as they become distorted, exaggerated, or sensationalized over time in their passage from one person to the next.

Some urban legends have passed through the years with only minor changes to suit regional variations. Case in point is the story of a woman killed by spiders nesting in her elaborate hairstyle. More recent legends typically reflect modern circumstances, like the story of people picking up dates in bars that become anesthetized and wake up minus a kidney, which was surgically removed for transplantation, and a phone set beside the tub with a note that read, “Call 911 or you will die.”

While these ‘facts’ don’t always have the narrative elements of traditional legend, they’re passed from person to person and commonly have the fundamentals of caution, horror or humor. Particular urban legends may be spread either as fact or as a story.

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Few urban legends can be traced back to their original source which appear to come out of nowhere. But some exceptions include:

• The Submarine, which is the name given to a particularly large and aggressive great white shark that’s falsely claimed to have dwelled in False Bay, near Cape Town, South Africa, during the 1970s and the 1980s.

• The Steam tunnel incident which refers to a set of urban myths for which players enacting live action role-playing games perish, often in the utility tunnels below their university campus.

• The Hungarian suicide song “ Gloomy Sunday” — known as the ‘Hungarian Suicide Song’ in the US. According to urban legend, it inspired hundreds of suicides.

Despite the name, a typical urban legend doesn’t necessarily originate in an urban setting — the term is simply used to differentiate modern legend from traditional.

Urban Legend Makeup
Many urban legends are framed as complete stories, with plot and characters. Most are typically characterized by some combination compelling appeal of humor, horror, warning, embarrassment, morality or appeal to empathy. Some can resemble a joke but are much darker in tone and theme. They often have some unforeseen twist that’s bizarre but just plausible enough to be taken as truth.

Many stories are presented as warnings or cautionary tales, while others might be more aptly called ‘widely dispersed misinformation.’

Photo Road less Traveled

Types of Urban Legends
In the tale of the organ harvesters, you can see how some of these elements come together. The most outstanding feature of the story is its sense of horror — a man waking up lying in a bathtub of ice minus a kidney. But the real hook is the cautionary element or moral lesson, in that the man wound up in a dire predicament after drinking at a bar and flirting with a mysterious woman. This is what’s known as a cautionary story.

Variations of the cautionary tale include the contamination story about human body fluids being found in restaurant food, and the long-standing rumors of rats and mice showing up in soda bottles and other packaged foods.

There are also contamination stories about the unintentional injection of drugs. One wide-spread legend reports that drug dealers have been coating temporary tattoos with LSD. The dealers give these tattoos to children, who put them on and absorb the LSD through their skin in a scheme to get the kids addicted to LSD so they become regular customers. Despite repeated public announcements that this story is false, people continue to spread the word about these drug-laced tattoos, posting warnings in police stations, schools and public places.

Photo Vashtia

But not all urban legends deal with such morbid issues. Many are simply amusing stories or ordinary jokes told as if they really occurred. One common “news story” reports that a man took out an insurance policy on an expensive box of cigars, smoked them all and then tried to collect a claim, saying that they had been damaged in a fire.

Another tale of a drunk driver pulled over by the police and asked to perform a sobriety test flees the scene when a car veers into a ditch up the road and the officer runs to help the other driver. He hears a loud knocking on his door the next morning to find the police officer from the night before. The man swears up and down he was home all night, until the officer asks to have a look in his garage. When he opens the door, he’s shocked to see the officer’s police cruiser parked there instead of his own car.

This story about the police car has spread all over the world in various forms and even made it into the movie ‘Good Will Hunting,’ relayed by one of the characters as if it had happened to one of his friends.

Much like some folk tales of old, there are urban legends dealing with unexplained phenomena such as phantom apparitions.

Friend of a Friend
People frequently allege that such tales happened to a ‘friend of a friend’ or ‘FOAF’ — a commonly used term when recounting this type of story.

The most remarkable thing about urban legends is that so many people believe them and pass them on. What is it about these stories that makes people want to spread the word?

Much has to do with the particular elements of the story. If you hear a gripping story and believe it, you feel compelled to warn your friends and family.

A person might pass on non-cautionary tales simply because they’re funny or interesting. When told well, a good urban legend will have you on the edge of your seat. It’s human nature to want to spread this feeling to others, and be the one who’s got everyone waiting to hear how the story turns out. Even if you hear it as an invented joke, you may be tempted to personalize it by claiming it happened to a friend. Basically, people love to tell a good story.

But why do people take them as truth instead of recognizing them as a tall tale or unsubstantiated rumor? More often than not, it has to do with how the tale is told. If a friend tells you an urban legend, they might say it happened to a friend of somebody they know. You trust them to tell you the truth, and you know they trust the person who told them the story. It seems like secondhand information, so you treat it as such.

But they aren’t really lying, and their friend wasn’t lying to them — both of them believe the story. But they’ve likely abbreviated the story to a degree, and you’ll probably do the same when you pass it on. Even though it happened to a friend of your friend, you might simplify it by saying it happened to your friend themselves. This is how each person who relays the story gives the impression that they’re only 2 people away from one of the characters in the story, when there are probably hundreds of people between them.

Since people often exaggerate, conflate or edit stories when telling them, urban legends can evolve over time.

Sources of Urban Legends
In the case of the LSD coated temporary tattoos, the story probably originated from a misinterpretation of an actual occurrence. While there’s little evidence of LSD stickers being distributed to kids, it’s common for drug dealers to sell acid on small pieces of blotter paper, which they frequently stamp with a trademark cartoon character. It’s likely that someone read about or saw a picture of these ‘acid tabs,’ and thought they were temporary tattoos targeted at kids.

Photo Stepmomof2

As for the organ thief story, there are traces how the legend really took off. A writer for the show ‘Law and Order’ heard the story and worked it into an episode. The show is well known for its ‘ripped from headlines’ stories, so viewers may have believed that the episode was based on a real event.

Folklore has been used as plots for movies, and fictional elements from movies have been circulated as real-life tales. Some might initiate the myth because it’s more exciting to say that an event actually happened than that it happened in a movie, or they may simply have forgotten where they even heard it.

Many believe an urban legend to be true when reported by a newspaper or authoritative source such as Halloween stories of razors in apples. There are no documented cases of contamination of Halloween candy, but media and police issue warnings every year. Journalists, police and other authorities do get things wrong at times, and most openly admit it. There is no infallible source of information.

Nearly anyone can be duped, as very few distrust everything and everyone. Most of us don’t investigate everything we hear — we accept much information as truth. Psychologically, we need to trust people for our own sense of comfort. And if you trust someone, you’ll believe nearly anything they tell you. This trust can run so deep that some insist an urban legend really happened, even when confronted with evidence proving otherwise.

Some tales are passed on because the details make them seem valid. Hearsay of children kidnapped from a local department store, or various gang instigations that occurred in a particular area of your town may sound real because you’re familiar with the setting. This level of specificity can play into your fears and anxieties about what could happen to you in the places you regularly go to.

Legends evolve as cultures evolve, so new themes and variations pop up all the time.

People didn’t begin talking about urban legends until the 1930′s and 1940′s, but they’ve existed in some form for thousands of years. Urban legends are simply the modern version of traditional folklore existing alongside or in place of recorded history with the ‘oral tradition’ of passing of stories by word of mouth.

Photo Marelopeni

Unlike mythology, these stories are about real people in believable situations, often focusing on things a society found frightening. Many of the fairy tales we read today began as believable stories. Instead of warning against organ thieves and gang members, the stories conveyed dangers of the forest. In old Europe, the deep woods were a mysterious place to people where there were creatures that might attack you. We still have many fears in common with our ancestors, such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarves — the fear of food contamination.

Regardless of origins, urban legends typically include 1 or more common elements — the legend is retold on behalf of the original witness. Dire warnings are often given for those who might not heed the advice or lesson — a typical element of many e-mail phishing scams — and it’s often touted as “something a friend told me,” while the friend is identified by first name only or not identified at all.

What Do Urban Legends Mean?
Many folklorists contest that the more gruesome legends personify basic human fears, such as the story in the Vanishing Hitchhiker, providing a cautionary message or moral lesson in how to protect ourselves from danger.

Photo F. Sigorski

One example is the ‘hook-hand killer’ story — a young couple drive to a remote spot to park’ on a date. They hear a psychopath with a hooked hand has escaped from a local mental institution on the radio. The girl thinks she hears a scratching sound outside the car. The boyfriend insists it’s nothing, but she convinces him to leave. When he drops her off at home and goes to open her door, to his horror, there’s a bloody hook hanging from the door handle.

The tale first circulated in the 1950′s when parking was a relatively new, and parents were terrified of what could happen to their kids. The warning and moral lesson of this story — don’t go off alone, and don’t engage in premarital intimacy, or something ghastly could happen. Most don’t take it very seriously today, passing it on to others for amusement rather than gospel truth like a ‘campfire ghost story.’

Photo Angelsk

Cautionary tales began to focus more on criminal groups rather than lone lunatics as gang violence increased in the 1990′s. In many cities in the US, worried citizens have spread accounts of a gang initiation rite in which gang members drive at night with their headlights turned off. When a driver flashes their headlights to signal that their car’s lights are out, the gang chases and kills them. Even those who don’t fully believe this may err on the side of caution.

We’re frequently fed by nameless restaurant employees, placing a lot of trust in people we know nothing about, and fear is played out about food contamination in our urban legends. If an urban legend hits on something many are afraid of, it’ll spread like wildfire. Urban legends also express something about the individual who believes them. You’re much more likely to believe and pass on legends that have some significance with your personal fears or experience.

Urban Legends and the Internet
The Internet actually accelerates the spread urban legends, but it has also allowed more efficient investigation of this social phenomenon. Thrashing out, tracking and analyzing urban legends has become a popular interest. It’s the topic of the Usenet newsgroup, alt.folklore.urban, and urban legend web sites — most notably Snopes.

The United States Department of Energy has a service called Hoaxbusters that deals with all sorts of computer distributed hoaxes and legends.

The TV show MythBusters has endeavored to prove or disprove urban legends by trying to replicate them. Among the legends proven accurate by the show’s hosts are the myth of the ‘Exploding Jawbreaker’ — heating a jawbreaker in a microwave can indeed make it explode — and the idea of filling a sunken boat with Ping-Pong balls to re-float it. It is possible, but it takes an enormous amount of Ping-Pong balls and a specially designed ‘funnel’ apparatus.

There has been a huge surge of urban legends on the Internet most commonly distributed by forwarded email. This storytelling method is unique because usually the story is not reinterpreted by each person who passes it on — one simply clicks the forward button. Receiving the original story gives ‘email legends’ a feeling of legitimacy. You don’t know the original author, but they’re speaking directly to you.

Forwarded email legends are frequently the designs of pranksters, not the creation of many different storytellers. The ultimate thrill is seeing how far a legend will spread. There are all kinds of email hoaxes — cautionary legends are very common in email forwards, often focusing on fabricated computer viruses or Internet scams. Even a skeptical person might forward this type of message just in case it’s true.

One form of email legend is the charity or petition appeal, promoting a good cause or a horrible injustice, instructing you to add your name to a petition and send it on to everyone you know. But there are certainly real email petitions which do help out good causes. It can be tricky to spot a hoax, but a good indicator is when no address appears to send the list to when it’s completed. And if a message begins with “This is not a hoax or urban legend,” it likely is.

Photo Nadi0

One of the most well-known email legends is the Neiman Marcus cookie recipe with an appeal to fight injustice. The email is a personal account of a woman eating at a Neiman Marcus store who asks the waitress for the recipe, and is told that she can buy it for “two-fifty.” When she sees the Neiman Marcus charge on her credit card, she realizes that she has been charged $250, rather than $2.50. She’s refused a refund, and attempts to get revenge by distributing the recipe freely over the Internet, encouraging you to send it to everyone you know.

While the recipe makes scrumptious cookies, they’re not the kind sold at Neiman Marcus, and there is no $250 Neiman Marcus cookie recipe. When the email was first circulated, Neiman Marcus didn’t even make such a chocolate chip cookie. Incredibly, this story has been around in various forms since the 1940′s. In the 1980′s, the swindling company was Mrs. Fields. Before that it was the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York, and the recipe was for a Red Velvet Cake.

These sorts of email stories demonstrate just how deep rooted urban legends are. No matter how much “information technology” we develop, human beings will always be drawn in by the unsubstantiated rumor. It will forever be human nature to tell bizarre stories, and there will always be someone who believes them.

Dead Hoax Giveaways
Signs that a story you’re hearing is likely a false urban legend: • It happened to a friend of a friend, not to the storyteller.
• There are many variations.
• The general topic is one that’s often on the news or what people gossip most about — death, sex, crime, contamination, technology, ethnic stereotypes, celebrities, horror or beating the system.
• It contains a warning or moral lesson of some kind.
• It’s just too weird or too good to be true.

Mythbusters – Plane on Conveyor Belt

Mythbusters Tennis Ball Lockpick

Mythbusters Water Heater

Sources: Wikipedia and How Stuff Works

Tags:bizarre folklore legends myth myths odd stories tales tradition unusual urban legend urban legends urban myth weird

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